Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin (November 15, 1935 – July 7, 2005) was an American-born poet and author. Originally from Boston, Sobin attended the Choate School, Brown University, and moved to Paris in 1962. Eventually he settled in the village of Goult, Provence, where he remained for over forty years, publishing more than a dozen books of poetry. Sobin maintained his expatriate status until his death in July, 2005 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 69.Mr. Sobin is survived by his wife, Susannah Bott, his daughter Esther, his son Gabriel, an older brother Harris, of Phoenix, Arizona, and his devoted cousin, Mikki Ansin of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Overview

After studies with Rene Char, Sobin developed a poetic style that relies heavily on assonance and consonance, as well as other methods of the sonic organization of speech. He published many books, including fiction, essays, and translations (including a translation of Henri Michaux's "Ideograms in China", a prose poem about Chinese orthography).

Among his works of fiction are the novels "The Fly Truffler" (about the art of truffle-hunting in Southern France), and "In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star", which is a chronicle of a brief period of Greta Garbo's early acting career.

Selected bibliography

Poetry

* "The Earth As Air" (New Directions, NY, 1984. 103pp, paperbound)
* "Miniatures" (Cadmus Editions, San Francisco, 1986: 200 copies, privately distributed)
*"Voyaging Portraits" (New Directions, NY, 1988. 121pp, pb)
*"Breath's Burials" (New Directions, NY, 1995. 101pp, pb)
*"By the Bias of Sound: Selected Poems 1974-1994" (Talisman House, Jersey City, NJ, 1995. 169pp, pb)
*"Towards the Blanched Alphabets" (Talisman House, 1998. 123pp, h/c & pb)
*"Articles of Light & Elation" (Cadmus, 1998. 50pp)
*"In the Name of the Neither" (Talisman House, 2002. 57pp, pb)
*"The Places as Preludes" (Talisman House, 2005, 76pp, pb)

Prose: fiction & essays

*"Venus Blue" (Bloomsbury, London, 1991, out of print) - novel
*"Dark Mirrors" (Bloomsbury, 1992, out of print) - novel
*"The Fly-Truffler" (Norton, New York, 1999) - novel
*"Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc" (University of California Press, 1999. 247pp, pb) - essays
*"In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star" (Norton, NY, 2002) - novel
*(translator) "Ideograms in China" by Henri Michaux; (New Directions, NY, 2002. 64pp, pb)
*"Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc" (University of California Press, 2009. 208pp. pb, hc) - essays- companion volume to "Luminous Debris"

External links

* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1578567,00.html Obituary at Guardian Unlimited]
* [http://www.shearsman.com/pages/editorial/recomm_us2.html SHEARSMAN BOOKS:– Recommendations] features a comprehensive listing of books by Sobin
* [http://jacketmagazine.com/31/hardy-sobin.html "Sparkling signatures"] Edmund Hardy reviews "The Places As Preludes" on-line at "Jacket Magazine" (number 31 : October 2006)

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